Mykl.biz
Consulting Technologist • Translating Geekery into plain English! • Have laptops, will travel • Please contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Today@Mykl.biz
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Apple wireless keyboard & mouse $100
This not a bad price for Apple’s attractive and discontinued wireless keyboard & mouse combo. If you prefer a keyboard with full-size keys (unlike the chicklet keys on Apple’s slim aluminum keyboard), this is the most used keyboard in my office. However, the Mighty Mouse is not my most favored pointing device.
How to shorten URLs
I’ve had several questions about this, recently.
If you cut-n-paste a long URL into your tweet on Twitter, it will automatically be shortened when you post the update. I think Twitter still uses the TinyURL service for this.
There are many other URL shortening services. All let you add a bookmarklet, in the bookmark bar of your web browser, which you can click at anytime to quickly create a short URL for the current web page.
I often use Bit.ly. Beside having an itty bity cute name, the service tracks basic statistics, like how many people click on each URL, when and where. This is helpful, if you want a sense of which posts are popular with your readers. Bit.ly also has built-in integration with Twitter, letting you post directly to your micro-blog, saving the extra step of shortening the URL on one web page, then moving to another to compose your micro-post.
One reason (of many) I use the Twitter application Twhirl for much of my micro-blogging is URL shortening is built-in, using whichever service(s) I prefer. Twhirl stores my Bit.ly login info, saving me yet another step.
Data Recovery Services
Another colleague reports that her hard drive died this week; and she has not been backing up regularly. Recovering data from a dead or dying hard drive is not easy, and therefore expensive.
Not long ago, another client paid a data recovery company about $3000 to retrieve the contents of her hard drive. She arranged this service through her local computer store, based on their advise. The company recovered most of her files, but delivered the results as a somewhat disjointed bunch of files. My client, not knowing how to parse through these files and restore them where they belong on her new hard drive, hired me to sort that out, and also setup a backup system to prevent this need from recurring.
Data recovery from an utterly dead drive is so painfully expensive, because the process is painstaking and mechanical, often starting with dismantling your damaged hard drive in a costly “cleanroom”. If you’re running a business, time is money, and your data is valuable. If you need your lost data right away, you probably need to bite the bullet, cough up a few $1000 bucks, and have your drive sent to a data recovery company, pronto.
Sometimes it’s possible to recover your data for a fraction of that cost, if you can wait a little longer to get it back. I’ve successfully recovered the full contents of many dying and malfunctioning hard drives, using simpler data recovery tools. The potential results depend on the severity and type of damage your particular drive has sustained. If it works, you’ll only be out a few hundred bucks (not thousands) for my time. If these methods can’t recover you drive, you’ll be out $150 for the time it takes me to determine the problem is too severe for this simpler fix, and the time it took to try.
If I can’t fix or recover your drive on the cheap, I can personally arrange the services of a high end data recovery vendor. These companies are accustomed to dealing with IT and computer store staff. I can talk to them in GeekSpeak, and to you in plain English. If you like, I can also setup your new and/or backup hard drive, using the data that is recovered.
Of course, you can avoid all these costs by backing up your data today, and on a regular basis hereafter, taking my free advice about how to backup your data while you sleep and work. Remember, every machine with moving parts will eventually break. The platters in your hard drive are revolving 4,000 to 10,000 times per second, with tolerances so tight that a grain of dust could scrape data off those platters. Be ready, with a full backup, for the day your drive dies.
And you can get more free advice in the future, by reading Mykl.biz or following my posts via Facebook, Twitter or RSS.
replacing your Mac's hard drive
Today, a friend’s MacBook wouldn’t bootup, but made a ”funny sickly spinning clicking sound under keyboard”. That sounds like a dying hard drive. My advice?
On a MacBook or iMac, replacing the internal hard drive is dead simple. If you can clip your own fingernails and pluck an eyebrow, you have the manual dexterity to accomplish this.
Go to the MyOWC page at Other World Computing. Tell it what model Mac you have. From their list, buy the biggest, fastest internal hard drive you can afford. While you’re there, take a look at or download their good how-to-install videos.
Right about now is when you wish you’d been using SuperDuper the way I describe in “Backup Your Data While You Sleep”. Nothing can put things back as they were faster and easier than the proper preventative use of SuperDuper. (Well, nothing easier than paying someone like me to do it for you.)
Don’t throw out your seemingly dead hard drive, yet. If you’re really lucky, you might still access it’s contents one last time, by connecting it to your computer as an external drive, using a $30 doodad like Newer Technology’s Universal Drive Adapter. If you can get your old drive to appear in the Finder, you may be able to restore all it’s contents (the System, applications, documents, photos, music, etc.) to your newly installed hard drive, saving yourself a sh_t load of time and bother (compared to starting from scratch). You can attempt such a restore using Apple’s Disk Utility or SuperDuper.
Leave a comment if you have questions about any of this.
